Today I fielded a phone call from who had what sounded like a loud video game blasting in the background over a modem speed Skype-quality phone line as he tried to explain his problem. Evidently, after several attempts to speak clearly, he managed to communicate that he had broken his video upload site software and wanted it fixed. No, wait, he said “some junior admin” had broken it. I bet I know who the junior admin was.

So to start out with he wanted to pay me with Paypal. Paypal charges the highest fees of any payment provider I have at my disposal, but I agree, and in comes an unverified, uncleared payment from him. I tell him I can’t accept the payment, and he will have to use a credit card or a cleared valid payment or have to wait 3-5 days for it to clear. After much grumbling and huffing he gets a card number to me and somewhat to my surprise it authorizes for the fee for one hour’s work. I never charge until after the job is finished to the customer’s satisfaction, so it was just authorized and it turns out never captured.

Next he sends me login details for about 6 sites and no root access to fix system problems, though the likely main issues with the sites were according to him related to unavailable system components or “bad config paths” So this inevitably leads to my spelling out unix commands to this guy over a crappy Skype phone line for over a half hour. He said he didn’t want to give me root without being able to “see what I was going to type first so I wouldn’t mess up his system” Isn’t it fun to work with new people who don’t know your abilities and say things that really make you cringe when you realize theirs?

Have you ever been to hell? I just have and it sounds like this: “yum -space- list -space- pipe -space- grep ….”

And of course imagine the typos introduced by this error prone communication method.

Finally I finished oh so painfully helping him get his system all straightened out and do an evaluation of all the external factors affecting his scripts to verify that it is correctly installed and I realize at that point that the best way to go would be to get the company who wrote the script involved as they may have seen the problem and have an easy fix for it.

Of course I probably should have done what he would have expected- been less than efficient and done the fixing myself, charging him for 4-6 hours of step by step debugging work on a very poorly written php code that could presumably easily been fixed in a half hour by its original author who has likely seen the problem 10 times already and probably had a patch laying around for it.

At this point he must have seen a way out of paying his bill, and demands his money back on the idea that I was declaring defeat. Because I tried to save him some time I must be incompetent. Of course, I had told him at least 3 times already that I never charged him anything in the first place, but he is very excited to get his nonexistent charge refunded and get some expert help which he sure valued while it was taking place- for free.

I think in the end it is fortunate that I got to sever my “relationship” with this clown with only wasting two hours on him. It’s fortunate that I only encounter one or so like him per year, but I would really like to cut down all the same.

I think next time junior admin calls me with America’s Army blasting in the background over a Skype line I’ll just suddenly have a very full schedule for about the next 10 months. After all, I honestly do.

Just recently I changed from a house-mount mast consisting of 3 telescoping galvanized steel tubes to using a $35 radio shack rooftop tripod with one 3/4″ 10′ heavy galvanized pipe for mounting the antennas on. This gives me much greater stability and about 10 feet of extra height over the old method. I can fairly easily just pop out the mast from the tripod to bring my 2m slim jim antenna and my 10/11m 1/4 wave down onto the roof for repairs.

After completing the move I discovered water in my 2 meter coax line. Fortunately it all dripped away from my radio rather than into my radio. To remedy that I got a lot of electrical tape and wrapped the connector on the slim jim which was formerly just covered with a layer of silicone, evidently it didn’t seal up very well.

To get the water out of the coax I am using a shop vac. Since the point at which my feedline enters the house is the lowest point of the line, all of the water will hopefully run out. I am running the vac every 1/2 hour or so to let any excess water wick down to the dry area at the bottom, and I’ll keep doing so until it vacuums dry. In the end this cable will have to be replaced, but if I can get it dry enough to operate it will get me by for a few weeks.

The SWR of the HF antenna jumped from 1.7:1 to 3 when I moved it. I suspect that the base of the Antron A-99 is electrically connected to the external braid of the coax and that previously it was using the metal mast as the lower resonating half of a dipole. The lower pole section however should have been well longer than the radiator so it would seem unlikely that this had any major resonance unless it added up to a particular fraction of 10 meters. I haven’t come up with any more satisfying explanation however and even after adding a few turns of coil as a sort of balun the SWR is no lower than 2.3:1. I think I may just measure the pole it used to be mounted on later today to determine if it was a likely resonator or not. In any case I have bought a somewhat cheap ZMF-949E antenna tuner to deal with this issue and an upcoming antenna project.

I grounded the tripod using some old 75 ohm coax that I didn’t have any other use for, but after talking to KB0MGQ I found out that that may be a bad idea since the 75 ohm coax will resist the AC components of a lightning strike due to the inductance even with the center connected to the braid, and it may possibly resist it more than the 50 ohm cable running to my radios. Well my radios are currently on an ungrounded circuit so there’s no quick way to ground via that path, but I realize what a bad situation that is and I have ordered 50″ of ground strap which I will soon use to properly ground both the antenna mast and my radios.

For hams who don’t want to actually weld ground straps as is often recommended, I came up with another idea of using hose clamps to attach them. The clamps can be had at your local hardware store for around $1 and will let you tightly bind the ground strap to both sides. I also use hose clamps to mount smaller antennas.

After swinging around the tripod a few times to see how much force it could handle I determined that I don’t yet need to run any guy wires to support the structure. I plan to add a good sized yagi or cubical quad to the mast in the future however so that may change. I positioned the tripod where I should have 3 solid points from which to anchor it when the time comes.

The terrorists won because we overreacted just like they knew we would.

In the United States, how many people have been killed per year by terrorism? Far fewer than have been killed by the rarest diseases which we spend comparatively nothing on. Far less than the suicides brought on by the stress of living under a constant invisible threat. Very few people. 911 was just Big and In Your Face because it was on TV and you could see the pain and distress of these poor souls right in your living room over and over and over and over again.

But think about this before you call me a cold old crotchet. If we didn’t react any more strongly to 911 than we do to all of these faceless suicides and other senseless fatalities what motivation would there be for these terrorists to proceed with planning more attacks? Simply none. By simply acknowledging the suffering of the victims and moving on we would shown the wisdom that would have stopped the onslaught.

Bin Laden said he would bankrupt us. We let him do that. Look at the state of the dollar, it’s on the toilet paper spiral due to our ballooning debts to fight a war that was never appropriate to begin in the first place.

Let’s dispel one big myth that seems to have set hold in the fear infested society of today’s America. Terrorists are not irrational people. Even suicide bombers have reasons. In Afghanistan at least the majority of them are afflicted by a terminal illness and they just want to make some money for their families before they die.

While the official pictures given out by the government of the suspected Infamous 911 19 seem to contain persons still living, it is pretty safe to say that those who participated did not feel they had much life left to live.

By continuing to feed the Hollywood style media that exploits this type of tragedy we have worked ourselves into a frenzy that has spiraled out of control. It’s time to wake up people.

Elect someone with some sense and some spine.

My personal choice is Kucinich as he is the person with more guts and sense that I have seen in politics for a long time.

They’re Radio Moscow.

My friend Kevin Anderson’s brother Zach is the bass player. But that doesn’t make them rock any less. Check it out if you like blues based rock and roll.

It’s a healthy obsession, tuning your system for maximum power savings. I have been doing that for about the last 5 years and I have never encountered anything like my current rig.

After doing some reading about the supposedly remarkable power/performance of the new Intel Core processors I recently offloaded a lot of power hungry AMD computers that generated a lot of heat if not noise and exchanged them all for a new Intel Core Duo system.

This means in my case about 3x the performance at only 60-75% of the power. Seriously these Core Duo systems with onboard video are amazing.

My old single cpu AMD system idled at 80 watts. The new dual core system does 57 watts.

I needed dual screens, and the Shuttle SG31 G2-BK provides two video out jacks. The onboard video controller permits extending your desktop across two monitors which is how I work- one IDE screen and one everything else. This is a huge power savings having such a video system built into the motherboard, and it isn’t that short on 3d capabilities either if you are into high end games which these days I’m not.

Performance on compiling code is incredibly good with my E6400 CPU with 4MB of L2 Cache. I never have seen a cache of that size on a CPU and that was the selling point, and it turns out to have been a great choice and a very fair price.

I just built a Slim Jim 2m / 70cm antenna that is looking like it will stay below 1.3:1 SWR on 2m and below 1.7 on 70cm. It took a propane/oxygen torch, some tin solder and flux, and one 10′ section of 1/2″ copper pipe along with elbows and a T for mounting. One SO-239 connector with 18 awg solid copper wire provide an adjustable tuner at least until I get the sweet spot when I will solder them down and add some waterproofing.

I have been working on setting up my ham shack, and one problem was dealing with the big deep cycle 12v battery that I have been using to power my radio. Mainly how to keep a charge on it.

I have since decided to ditch the battery as a main power source altogether after I got the idea that I should just use an old computer power supply that I have laying around here. It is a switching, regulated supply capable of delivering at least 12 amps at 12v which is perfect for my current radio setup.

Since it is an ATX supply, I had to join the green wire to its neighboring black wire on the motherboard interface to have it remain on full time. My supply also has an on-off switch on the back which I will use instead of the soft-on as there is some power drain otherwise.

I pulled the yellow (+12v) wire and black wire(gnd) out of the pentium 4 supplementary power connector and attached a 12v->12v computerized battery charger which will keep the backup battery topped up in the best way possible.

I can now simply attach my radio to a free black/yellow on the power supply directly. They detach easily from the hard drive connectors also by pulling them out of the plastic.

I am planning to add a dpdt switch or possibly a relay to permit easy switching of my radios to backup power later on.

Here is a nice overview of using an atx supply for your non computer power needs.

And a nice picture of my current setup:

4-5 months ago I was stumbling around the net aimlessly when I ran across an article about an herb called Bacopa that was supposed to increase cognitive function as well as suppress stress related anxiety. Though I am usually very skeptical about such claims as it is not known to have any negative effects I ordered a few bottles to give it a try.

In short it works very well for high brain activity tasks like computer programming. My level of focus is far higher than usual when I have taken a standard dose and I feel relaxed as I work as well. None of the shoulder cramps or nervous muscle contractions that I get when I consume a lot of caffeine. I never have liked caffeine much, but I have relied on it to keep my brain awake when sleep or stress have kept me from working at 100% in the past.

I haven’t had any caffeine for months now, instead taking a few bacopa tablets whenever I am feeling too tired or unfocused to do quality programming work, and I am back in the zone in no time.

I highly recommend this mild herbal brain booster! You can buy it from any reputable herb supplier online and possibly in some health food stores though I have yet to see any in my local store.

Lets start at the start- I was 12 years old and I was fascinated by the multifaceted dice and the wild imaginings of my friend’s Dungeons and Dragons game. Adding to the fun was the fact that my mother was convinced by the mid-80’s hysteria of satanism that the D&D Game would land me in hell. I ask you, what tastes so sweet as a pleasure denied!

So naturally I played it whenever I could get away with it. I never had my own dice until later on and it was a fugitive activity that gave me a little taste of freedom and rebellion from my stifling home environment.

After I grew up I had mostly abandoned such games for more “grown up” activities especially as D&D had lost its forbidden nature in the liberation of my adulthood. Until I saw Mark playing Everquest on his computer. “Wow, I said, this is just like D&D but it requires no imagination nor dice!”

I had to try it. I was hooked like a fish in a barrel. So two years later I converted this gambling addiction over to World of Warcraft which had an even more idiot-friendly interface and plenty of extra little min/max features that gave us all the “edge” against the virtual goblin.

So what about these games appealed to me? I think at first it was the easy rewards and cheesy advancements that gave me new abilities and a sense that I was achieving something. After I had achieved everything possible, I reached that “now what” funk and started achieving whatever I could with another type of character. Then when that was exhausted, at which point I was a complete expert in the game, I started playing against other players. When that happened I realized that I was a hamster on a wheel and that the cheese would always fill my nose but would never land in my mouth without making a full time job of this game.

I drew the line there. I have a job, and whenever something I do in my free time even approaches interfering with my work or family (which I had become married well into my WoW phase) I have to stop it. So I did.

What got me off it permanently was mainly the realization that it was no different from playing online poker. The rewards were randomized. The only way to increase your odds was to play a lot more. I was turning into one of those sad old women who sit all day at the nickel slots jerking the lever waiting for that big exciting $100 jackpot. And perhaps like her, I was often edgy and tense because of it.

But that’s not to say I have eliminated all games. I do still enjoy playing Pharaoh, the best city building game I have yet discovered. It’s also a game that demands no particular time investment and can be saved and shut off in seconds without consequences.

But since I quit my gambling games I have rediscovered huge tracts of time in my life that were formerly completely absorbed by the WoWie monster. I have read many books, learned some Arabic, reorganized my house, fixed the air leaks in the windows for the winter, become a licensed ham, made my wife happy, successfully raised a big garden, made my dog happier, learned more about electronics, learned new computer programming languages, developed new friendships, volunteered in the community, and done a lot of other useful things that make me feel far better than mindlessly jerking the machine could ever achieve.

In September I decided to enroll in another round of part-time university study as my schedule seemed to permit, and I placed myself in “Software Design Methodologies” or Coms 309. Pretty swiftly I ended up with a team and a mission: to design a software for tracking weather balloon flights done by Iowa State’s SSCL lab. The team consists of Joe who works at the lab and had the idea, Adam, Bader and myself.

The software needs to take information gathered over APRS (automatic position reporting system) from the high altitude balloon and present it to a flight manager as well as a recovery team who will be chasing it. It needs to handle prediction of where the balloon is likely to go next so that the recovery team doesn’t waste too much gas tracking it, store the data from the entire flight for later review, and a whole slew of other requirements.

The class is centered around model driven development. Being more of a natural at developing software off the cuff it has been a big adjustment for me to slow down and look at the problems involved and define them carefully. The main thing I want to get out of the class is to get a real understanding of how teams work together most effectively, and having a clear model using an SRS, DFD, formal use cases, etc are new to me and obviously very useful information. This will change the way I approach software development projects for clients and probably result in my being able to solicit more interesting jobs.

My former approach was simply to jump directly to use cases and feature lists, make an estimate and present that to the client. This works just fine for smaller projects. When you have a team however, or a client who is more risk averse, you can’t do that without creating potential areas of confusion and insecurity. Modeling ensures that your client has exactly the same understanding of the project that you do. Nothing is worse than wasting developer time.

I’ll post again about the specifics of the project and the end result closer to the end of the semester in December. There are a number of unexpected problems that I have to overcome in terms of management of the project and I will write about them in more detail when the job is done.